Srivastava - DevOps in SharePoint: Hands-On Packer, Terraform, Ansible, Vagrant

DevOps in SharePoint
Copyright 2021 by Sachin Srivastava

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Sachin Srivastava is a solutions architect and cloud consultant with over 15 years in the technology sector. Sachins experience dates back to the dot-com boom era, where he managed ecommerce sites based on Unix and written in Java. He is an advocate for DevOps practices with a focus on cloud-agnostic tools and modern frameworks. Sachins software development, coupled with cloud infrastructure, has been instrumental in helping companies realize the benefits of many clouds by mentoring teams in migrating legacy monolithic applications into microservices, building CI/CD

pipelines, and orchestrating Docker containers using Kubernetes on three of the leading clouds (AWS, GCP, and Azure), all while maintaining a cloud-agnostic strategy.

Vikas Singh is a solutions architect. In his role he discovered a passion for automating Windows using Ansible. He has twice spoken at AnsibleFest California about Ansibles Windows support. He has contributed several Ansible Windows modules, and he has been an external core committer to the Ansible project since 2016. He can be found helping others automate on the #ansible IRC channel or on the Ansible-- project Google group.

Id like to thank two wonderful people that supported me on this journey. First, my parents, for all of their enthusiasm and dedication. They made this project so
much easier, and I am forever grateful for this.
Id also like to thank my good friend Vikas Singh. Vikas, I value your friendship and
appreciate all the work you put into our project. Your support means so much to me. Thank
you for being such a great soul.

Sachin Srivastava xiii Before we begin exploring the modern DevOps practices in deploying and managing SharePoint, you need to understand what DevOps is.

In this chapter, we discuss DevOps. We put it into context as it relates to SharePoint infrastructure projects, and how we can leverage these practices and tools to ultimately achieve agility, predictability, repeatability in deployments, and cost savings in the maintenance aspect of the platform on-premises or in the cloud.

Note This book focuses on DevOps as it relates to the infrastructure of SharePoint; however, these principles apply to the development of new features on top of SharePoint (i.e., WebParts, workflows, or new components using the SharePoint Framework).

It is common for the community to have a different interpretation of DevOps. To be clear, DevOps is not a set of tools or a role within the enterprise.

DevOps is comprised of principles (both technical and cultural) and practices for delivering applications and services at high velocity. In many organizations, these practices entail that the development and IT pros/operations teams work together in the full life cycle to achieve this. This is where the cultural aspect of DevOps practice comes into play, as it represents a shift from the traditional silos of these teams; however, the collaboration between these teams is paramount to increase DevOps maturity within the enterprise.

This collaboration between the two teams increases agility and transparency in delivering the solutions that ultimately both teams are responsible for. With this transparency, product managers and other internal customers can easily gain insight into any progress and/or problems in the delivery pipeline.

Figure 1-1 shows you where three common siloed enterprise teams efforts are joined to practice DevOps.
Figure 1-1. Three traditionally siloed enterprise teams are joined to practice DevOps within the enterprise

Depending on the size of an organization, there could be fewer teams; for example, an organization may have a development team that writes their own automation tests, and an operations team whose focus is on infrastructure on-premises or in the cloud.

Lets take a closer look at the core practices of DevOps to further help us understand why DevOps is important as it relates to SharePoint initiatives.

In the scenario shown in Figure 1-2 , there are two teams. The development teams focus as it relates to applying the core DevOps practices typically involves code build, test coverage, packaging, and deployment readiness. For the operations team, however, most of the focus is onenabling the automation of the development teams tests and builds, as well as the infrastructure, which includes provisioning, configuration management, orchestration and deployment of software, and infrastructure using IaC (Infrastructure as Code).

Note We go over IaC in the Applying DevOps Practices section of this chapter.
Figure 1-2. The development and operations teams collaborate to practice DevOps

It is important to note that the same underlying methods, such as version control, rollback, and testing are used by both teams while applying DevOps practices. Figure 1-3 is a holistic DevOps view that shows the various componentssuch